Davis Feather Mill (c.1856-c.1960)Contributed by Survey of London on Jan. 2, 2018

A prominent local business, the Davis Feather Mill occupied a site behind
Gardiner’s Corner from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Its
collection of factory-warehouses spanned between Whitechapel High Street and
Manningtree Street, with elevations to both streets.

The establishment and success of the feather mill can largely be attributed to
one man, Isaac Davis, born in Whitechapel in Catherine Wheel Alley in 1830,
his father a Jewish feather merchant. Davis’ close personal acquaintance with
the difficulties of life in nineteenth-century Whitechapel spurred him on to
enter into an apprenticeship with a London-based cigar manufacturer, which was
followed by a period working in American cigar factories. He returned to
Whitechapel in 1856 with money in hand and the ambition to reform and expand
his father’s East London business in order to bring the high-quality feather
beds of the rich to within reach of the poor. He set up shop at 63 Whitechapel
High Street in the same year. The young entrepreneur began by importing vast
quantities of feathers from around the world in such a way as to dominate the
market. He then innovatively deployed steam technology to clean the feathers,
and shrewdly purchased second-hand feather beds for rehabilitation and
upgrade. He was reported to have caused ‘something like a furore’ on account
of the low prices of his goods. By 1890, Davis effectively monopolised the
feather-bed market, having also diversified into quilts, rugs and other
household furnishings.1

The transformation from humble family business to a large-scale commercial
success was enabled through a similarly significant expansion of premises.
Over two decades, Davis acquired 59–62 Whitechapel High Street and the
patchwork of properties behind this, stretching back to Manningtree Street.
The most extensive redevelopment of the site occurred in the mid-1880s when
Davis employed the local architect John Hudson to design a new factory-
warehouse. The three-storey block was said to be ‘magnificent…containing all
the latest improvements and built throughout with a view to the health of the
large number of hands now employed.’2 The mill was however prone to fires;
only a few days after its re-opening in 1888, it was severely damaged.
Sporadic fires afflicted the premises in subsequent years leading to semi-
frequent rebuildings, yet the business continued to flourish, operating on the
site until about 1960 despite suffering a direct hit during the Blitz in
1940.3

Isaac Davis died in 1913, having fulfilled his youthful ambition to become a
public benefactor. At the Great Synagogue (Duke’s Place), his father and
grandfather had acted as Beadle and Assistant Beadle respectively and Isaac
himself was a generous supporter of many local Jewish causes including the
Jews’ Hospital, Jews’ Orphan Asylum and the East London Synagogue.4

Portrait bust of Isaac Davis by Alfred Drury, A.R.A. published in the 'Jewish
Chronicle', 4 April 1913.

In the early 1960s, the London County Council (LCC) imposed a new traffic
management plan on the area around Gardiner’s Corner. Commercial Road was
diverted to create a new junction with Whitechapel High Street further east.
This new road ran along the western edge of the Davis Feather Mill,
precipitating its compulsory purchase and closure of the business.

Having secured a 99-year lease from the LCC, Central and District Properties
Ltd funded redevelopment of the site and architects Lush & Lester were
commissioned to design a large six-storey flatted factory. At this time, rag-
trade warehouses, showrooms and workshops still proliferated in Whitechapel,
often operating in cramped conditions, cheek-by-jowl with housing. Lush &
Lester’s scheme was one of a number of local efforts on the part of the LCC to
concentrate and increase accommodation standards for these and other small-
scale businesses, many of which were to be displaced by wider redevelopment in
Stepney Borough. Contemporary with 1-13 Adler Street, Lush and Lester’s
flatted factory followed a recently revived building model which sought to
provide small-scale urban industry with affordable, purpose-built units, zoned
away from housing. The aim was to allow ‘one man’ enterprises to prosper.1

Lush & Lester responded to the challenge of building cheaply and sturdily
with the pragmatism that was characteristic of their work; their proposal of a
reinforced-concrete frame of six bays east–west and ten bays north–south was
built.

Externally, large windows wrap around all sides of the building and pre-cast
exposed aggregate panels alternate with fair-faced concrete, painted light
grey. On the short north and south elevations, centrally positioned external
staircases recede into the core of the building then project forward beyond
the building line. These distinctive gestures marked the principal entrances
to the workshops located on the second to fifth floors. Seven ground-floor
showrooms faced onto Whitechapel High Street and the newly diverted Commercial
Road, each assigned a set of internal stairs giving access to self-contained
first-floor warehouses or workshops. Running parallel to the long east
elevation, a service lane branches off Manningtree Street, snaking around a
circular substation towards underground parking.2

The construction of Central House began in June 1964, delayed by adjacent
roadworks, and was completed in June 1965. Although the ground and first
floors were immediately occupied by textile businesses, the Sir John Cass
School of Art was accepted as main tenant of the rest of the building. The
building was easily adapted to educational purposes courtesy of a network of
modular partitions, but the logic and intention of the flatted factory was
lost.3

By the mid-1980s, local textile and fashion entrepreneur Roy Sandhu was using
a number of properties around Gardiner’s Corner for his business ‘Roy
Manufacturing’. However, having acquired the freehold for Central House and
with the rag trade on the wane, in 1986 Sandhu turned his attention to
property development. He commissioned Wapping-based architect Ian Ritchie to
daringly reimagine a site that stretched all the way from Commercial Road to
St Mary’s Gardens (now Altab Ali Park), taking in Central House and allowing
for the closure of White Church Lane. The speculative scheme tested the
appetite for a new monolithic banking centre located just outside the City,
presenting a potential rival to Canary Wharf.1

The proposal consisted of a semi-cylindrical office tower of sixty storeys,
taller than any other tower in Europe at the time and inflected with High-Tech
nuance. Dealing floors clad in translucent glass were to be punctuated by open
garden levels at strategic intervals. A four-storey mixed-use podium at the
base of the tower was intended as a concession to the urban context, so too
was the creation of new parkland behind the tower, envisioned to extend and
upgrade the facilities of St Mary’s Gardens. Sandhu’s proposal was widely
reported, at least in part on account of the businessman’s rags-to-riches
story and bold ambition. ‘Roy’s Corner’, as the scheme was mockingly referred
to, was not well received by Tower Hamlets Council nor by local residents.
Criticism focussed on the tower’s high proportion of office space, its
potential impact on the rag trade, and its unprecedented scale. An
unfavourable political climate, precipitated by the change from Labour-led
local council to a Liberal one, ensured the controversial scheme was shelved.
Despite such strength of opposition, the proposal was resurrected in 1988 with
only a slight reduction in its height. To the incredulity of critics, Ritchie
claimed that ‘the tower will be hardly visible from street level until you
look upwards and then it will be like gazing into the 21st century.’2 The
scheme failed once more but Ritchie was not mistaken with regard to the future
of Aldgate.3

Via a series of mergers, the vestiges of the Sir John Cass School of Art were
subsumed into London Metropolitan University (LMU) in 2002. Central House had
been retained throughout the School’s various iterations, used for the
teaching of art, craft and design for over three decades. Additional workshops
were located in a separate building on Commercial Road. In 2011 the University
decided to move its architecture department from its Holloway Road premises,
on which the lease was due to expire, to Central House, to create a unified
‘creative hub’ in Whitechapel. All floors of Central House were then in
possession of the soon-to-be expanded Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.
The first upgrade of the building was undertaken by architects Cartwright
Pickard, whose extensive re-organisation of the ground-floor and basement
created new entrance, gallery, café, gym and studio spaces.1

As Director of Architecture and Dean of the Cass Faculty, Robert Mull
commissioned ‘ultimate insiders’ at LMU, Florian Beigel, Philip Christou and
the Architecture Research Unit (ARU), to re-conceive the upper floors of
building to facilitate the teaching of architecture.2 Their scheme re-
asserted the original structure of the building, but deliberately sought to
disrupt its uncompromising pragmatism in order to allow for informal
connections between disciplines to emerge serendipitously. After relocating to
Central House in the summer of 2013, students and staff of the architecture
department acknowledged the efficacy of Beigel, Christou and the ARU’s
sensitive interior interventions. Moreover, the ‘Aldgate Bauhaus’ continued to
benefit from its proximity to the East End art scene and the Whitechapel
Gallery. Faculty-wide confidence in the future culminated in July 2015 in a
proposal for a large-scale installation of external signage, designed by art
Professor Bob and Roberta Smith. It was to proclaim that ‘Art Makes People
Powerful’. Events that unfolded subsequently suggested otherwise.3

In October 2015, under increasing financial pressure, LMU’s senior management
presented a ‘one campus, one community’ plan, anticipating the closure of
nineteen courses and a much-reduced student body. Central House was designated
for sale and the Cass was to be relocated to Holloway Road, its custom-
designed teaching spaces discarded. The proposed closure was met with fierce
opposition, perceived to be a short-sighted commercial decision, and
indicative of the identity crisis afflicting many former polytechnics in the
twentieth-first century. The ‘Save the Cass’ campaign drew widespread support
and publicity with David Chipperfield, Richard Rogers and Nicholas Serota
lending their backing. In December 2015, the sale of Central House was debated
in the House of Lords, but the government declined to take action and LMU’s
senior management did not lose their resolve.4

In February 2016, a development company, Frasers, purchased Central House from
LMU for £50 million, a price the University noted was ‘significantly above the
expected market level’.1 The building was formally vacated by the Cass on
31 August 2017 and is presently awaiting redevelopment. Planning for a new
mixed-use tower including retail, hotel and offices of approximately thirty
storeys is in its early stages. Outline designs have been prepared by Arney
Fender Katsalidis. The Cass is being temporarily housed in Calcutta House
awaiting relocation to Holloway Road.2

Robert Harbison, former professor of architecture at London Metropolitan
University, in conversation with Sarah Milne, Survey of London (31 May 2017):

"The architecture department only moved to this location in 2012. It was on
Holloway Road as long as I was teaching at the Cass. I haven't had any
experience of reporting to work in Whitechapel but I have been to Central
House a fair number of times. I think it worked well and it certainly was
pleasant to experience as an outsider. It was converted by Florian Beigel,
Philip Christou and ARU in an interesting way, but now it has been sold and is
not going to function as a school anymore. So it turns out to have been an
extremely short-lived but very inventive use of a sixties office building. It
was a relatively cheap conversion that flaunted its ad hoc qualities, bold in
the way that it thought of the spaces and used them. Spaces were often
indeterminate, and flexible in their function. ARU has been an imaginative
architectural practice and this example of their work deserves to be recorded
as fully as possible before it disappears sometime in the summer. They made
fresh and lively spaces out of unpromising material.”

The building was sold to the property development company Frasers Property
(UK) Ltd for £50 million in 2016. London Metropolitan University is reported
to have leased building back until August 2017, but will then relocate the
faculty to Holloway.

The building was originally built as a textiles warehouse in the 1960s.

The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design, formed in 1965 from
the Sir John Cass College’s Department of Fine and Applied Art, merged with
the Department of Silversmithing and Allied Crafts from the Central School of
Art, and moved into Central House.